When you’re talking to an open source dev, just remember that they are literally giving you their time for free, and they are people who don’t like to be treated poorly.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.
Edit 2: The reinstalling he’s talking about is NPM. So just running npm install. It’s because he tried removing the node_modules directory, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it means you need to reinstall the modules with that command.
Honestly, no. It’s your job to vet the software you run. If it’s open source, you had every chance to make sure it wasn’t going to irreversibly break your system ahead of time.
Alternatively, you could pay money for a solution from a reputable company with support.
You’re implying that to even install the simplest of programs, I’d need to read and understannd many thousands of lines of code, starting with the FOSS project itself and then spidering out to every dependency. This speaks nothing of the fact that it may be written in multiple languages, some of which I am not familiar with, and even if I am, code can be written in ways that’s almost impossible to understand. This might take a week for a 200 line project.
Reminds me of when my employer said they were going to stop using open source software until a team had vetted it completely. Lol, once they talked to engineers that idea died immediately.
This. I swear, some people in the FOSS community seem to be convinced everyone who uses a computer is a developer.
Right? And it seems like no one is interested in understanding my point, most only seem interested in defending developers of FOSS. I understand there is no legal obligation from FOSS devs… That is irrelevant.
I love FOSS. It’s one of the best products of humanity. I am not attacking devs at all…
My point was only that while devs don’t owe anyone anything legally, if the rare edge case happens where their code is destructive by accident, it would be a dick move to ignore complaints about it. I guess because it didn’t spell it all out like this, I “deserved” all the downvotes (on since-deleted comments) and condescending remarks?
Yes I know that if I use Firefox I can’t sue them if somehow they wipe my OS. Yes I know that would probably never happen, it’s extremely unlikely to happen. But if it did, FF owes us at least a response. And I means owes in the sense that it’s the right thing to do, not “if you don’t do it I can sue you”.
Who put the gun to your head and made you run the software though?
The response to this here is absolutely wild. I guess I should expect my machine to get wiped any moment
Whenever you choose to run a program that has full access to parts of your PC that may cause issues, you are the person who chose to do so.
Just run apps in a sandbox if you don’t want to risk having to reinstall your OS in a worst case scenario.
The developer owes you nothing.
Legal obligations that I grasped at age 9 don’t really interest me to talk about. It’s pretty obvious I understand them. What I was trying to talk about was what reasonable people should do. But apparently that’s offensive to many ITT as most responses are condescending af
We might be condescending due to braindead users like this:
Despite grasping legal obligations at the age of 9, taking responsibility for your own actions seems to still be a struggle. Good luck.
The extent to which you’re attempting to sound intelligent would be saddening if you weren’t being so rude. I won’t be replying to you in the future.
That’s absolutely a ridiculous stance. Yes, you can personally go through everything, but there’s also searching around to find out what other people say about it, actually look through the issues people have raised. Some of it applies to proprietary software as well, find out what other people say about the software. You don’t need to do everything yourself, but you do have to take responsibility for trying to make sure it will work as you hope it will.
Whoosh